Multimodal Learning Analytics Across Physical and Digital Spaces

Student’s learning happens where the learner is rather than being constrained to a single physical or digital environment. Educational research has revealed the pedagogical benefits of letting students experience different types of content, “real world” challenges, and physical and social interactions with educators or other learners.

Students commonly work outside the boundaries of the institutional learning system(s). They may interact face-to-face, use other educational tools or even use tools that were not specifically designed to serve in learning contexts. Teachers may want students to use not only the tools offered by the institution, but also other tools that are more suitable to the context and subject matter.

Pervasive and mobile technologies can be used to allow learners to get remote access to educational resources from different physical spaces (e.g. ubiquitous/mobile learning support) or to enrich their learning experiences in the classroom in ways that were not previously possible (e.g. face-to-face/blended learning support). This is creating new possibilities for learning analytics to provide continued support or a more holistic view about learning, moving beyond desktop-based learning resources. An overarching concern is how to integrate analytics across these different spaces and tools in a coordinated way. In short, there is an increasing interest in providing support for students’ learning across physical and digital spaces, and the means to achieve this are more readily available.

This project is contributing to the community through different events, publications and resources. Current outputs include the following: